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Fuck Your Miracle Year

rogersbacon.substack.com

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Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#41

Post by nostrebored »

pjbeam wrote: post #31
spir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

I was shocked to (re)discover that high school algebra is a multiyear course. And trigonometry is a year long. What?

We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity.

Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.

I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.

His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.

We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#42

Post by jameshart »

spir wrote: post #10
spir wrote: post #6

> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”). Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious. Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I ha…

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

One of the things that is deeply ingrained in education curricula, yet which doesn’t seem remotely justified pedagogically, is the timetable. The idea of studying lots of subjects, all at once, via daily or weekly sub-hour-long bite-sized lessons.

If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#44

Post by photochemsyn »

The claim that 'the miracle year' is some fundamental rule in scientific discovery and that people's best work is always done in some flurry of creativity in their younger years is the kind of claim that might sell magazine articles - it's simple to understand, you can cherry-pick a few examples, and that might get you some mass appeal.

However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:

https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-r...

Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equatio...

> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."

Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.

Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.

As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#45

Post by javajosh »

nerdponx wrote: post #21
spir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

I have become convinced that inadequate public schooling is the reason why America has come to rely so much on college to make people "ready for society". Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.

>Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked

My impression is that public school teachers have been un-empowered to fail out kids, or punish them for bad behavior in class.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#46

Post by csa »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #29
jotm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned most of it in libraries and later the Internet. Car repairs (to work in an auto service), audio technology (for building custom speakers and amps), computer hardware (for myself), programming (still shit at it), marketing (was fun), psychology (was kinda useless), English (very useful), lots of stuff. So kids these days have it easy :D I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but…

Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with. Without it folks might end up pigeonholed into whatever their family does or a narrow selection of trades within the local community.

> Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with.

All of which is usually covered by 8th grade in the US.

HS is a waste for most people attending.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#47

Post by vsareto »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #34
DubiousPusher wrote: post #2

> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me. > Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. I'm readi…

I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.

That seems worthless if they find their own way to knowledge outside of the schools.

I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#48

Post by Natsu »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #34
DubiousPusher wrote: post #2

> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me. > Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. I'm readi…

I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.

I feel like things are going to diverge further, between people floating around through the system and learning almost nothing vs. those self-learners who ignore that and learn on their own, not letting anything hold them back.

Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year

#50

Post by nsxwolf »

nerdponx wrote: post #21
spir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

I have become convinced that inadequate public schooling is the reason why America has come to rely so much on college to make people "ready for society". Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.

If they’re overworked, what is it they’re working so hard and so ineffectively at?
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